Cibelle Performs

The Clocktower Gallery & Radio and the artist Shoplifter welcome the Brazilian born tropical-punk delight Cibelle for a performance in our upper gallery, where she creates a sound and performance piece inside Shoplifter's wild installation, Nervescape.

About this Cibelle writes:

The world ended. The last whistle blew. The moon waned away, the sun plunged so low it burned out of the sky, and a last wave took out the planet. You’re one of the lucky few who escaped to another galaxy. But sometimes you can’t resist climbing into your spaceship and coming back to see all that’s left of your old Earth: a jungle on a floating rock, where monkeys are mutated by the acid rain, birds are turned to neon and the ocean drips into nowhere. And where a paradise nightclub band is playing at the last cabaret in town, the Las Venus Resort Palace Hotel. This scorched old bar has become the only hangout for anyone who’s left, and they’re all partying like it’s the end of the world - because it is - lulled by the sultry sounds of the enchanting hostess Sonja Khalecallon and her band Los Stroboscopious Luminous. As she sings and shimmies, it tastes like a cocktail so sweet, so sad, so seductive, that you will forget all others. Welcome to the pleasure zone to end all pleasure zones. But please remember: don’t feed the monkeys!

The Las Venus Resort Palace Hotel, where we find Sonja Khalecallon and her band Los Stroboscopious Luminous, is the only place left after the apocalypse at the end of the world.

Sonja invites you to plunge into her world of warped exotica (inspired by the kitsch and pseudo-exotic style of music that was all the rage in the USA at the start of the 1960s), for a post-nuclear tropical rundown punk cabaret soundtrack of an album comprising nine original songs and three inventive covers: "Mango Tree" (as sung byUrsula Andress in the James Bond film "Dr No"), "Lightworks" (from the eccentric Raymond Scott, a seminal exotica producer and pioneer of electronic music in the 1950s) and "It's Not Easy Being Green" (originally by none other than Kermit The Frog from The Muppets!).

Sonja Khalecallon is in fact one of the alter egos of Cibelle, the London-based tropical punkster whose take on music is entirely her own.
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Cibelle Cavalli Bastos
mostly Sonja Khalecallon
more known as just Cibelle
born and raised in Sao Paulo- Brazil of an alagoano half native indian father with an italian mix mother
been in London for 10 years
34 years in this body
lives between a suitcase and London, prefers window seats on a plane
multimedia and performance artist working with music in the shape of a singer, composer and music producer for 12 of those years, with 3 albums released worldwide
pictographer of the subconscious
has been transpiring expressions in the southern heat in watercolours, performance, assemblage, video, words and sound, in whichever order, whatever comes.

Interviews and footage of Cibelle's performance at the Clocktower Gallery (provided by Rabbit TV)






Cibelle a very young age lived among paint brushes, clays and musical instruments. She studied music at the conservatory Marcelo Tupinambá where fine arts were also taught , and it was there that she began to expand to fine arts, not just music. She grew up being kidnapped from one art form to another and consolidated her musical career as singer, composer and producer, but always departing from a point connected with the fine art, not just music per se and obsessed with taking pictures of the subconscious. Whilst staying at a small Italian village awaiting her European passport, with nothing to do, Cibelle ressurected her paint brushes and other practices; em 2008 Cibelle had first outbreak of watercolors, or "photographs of the subconscious", as she likes to call them, and in the same year started to collaborate with the collective and fanzine FUR.co.uk (Cassia Tabatini, Fabio Gurjao, Rodrigo Garcia Dutra amongst others) exhibiting at the Gold 08 in London and at the end of the year participating with the collective assume vivid astro focus at the 28th Biennial of Sao Paulo. In 2009 participated in the poetry marathon of the Serpentine Gallery, and her video performance Gosma Aquatics (by Rodrigo Garcia Dutra) was exhibited at the MOT, Tokyo as a part of AVAF's collective installation. In 2010 opened the multimedia installation "Sonja Khalecallon products for a Better Life" including a performance and video instalaçao "Abravana Gosmic Shopping Show", but until then, only the closest friends had come into contact with Cibelle's watercolour works, then finally in February 2012 came the exhibition "Esquemas para una Oda Tropical" curated by Pablo Leon de la Barra, where Cibelle's watercolour were shown for the first time, alongside trabalhos by Dominique Gonzales Foster, Laercio Redondo, Daniel Steegmann, Rodrigo Matheus, Arto Lindsay amongst others. Cibelle was recently invited to gate crash at the Universidade de Verão at Capacete Entretenimentos and participated of Exposiçao no Apartamente and Exposiçao no Apartamento Extended Mix at Espace Phosphorus with a the video piece Microcosmo alongside Adriano Costa, Deison Gilbert, Mark Bria, Jac Leirner, Anna Mazzei and other contemporaries.